Multiple choice questions or items are an interesting way to assess various levels of learning outcomes, from basic recall to application, analysis, and evaluation.
They are not an effective way to test students’ ability to organize thoughts or articulate explanations or creative ideas, but these abilities should have been assessed in previous tasks such as the FC and PBL activities.
As you all know, a multiple choice item consists of a problem, known as the stem, and a list of suggested solutions, known as alternatives. The alternatives consist of one correct or best alternative, which is the answer, and incorrect or inferior alternatives, known as distractors.
The stem should be meaningful by itself and present a definite problem (unless you want to test your students' ability to draw inferences from vague information). The stem should not content irrelevant material or be negatively stated, students can have difficulty understanding with negative phrasing. It also should be a question or an unfinished sentence, the former better than the latter.
The alternatives should be plausible, they serve as distractors. They should be stated clearly and concisely, and mutually exclusive (and so, all the above or none or the above are not good options) and homogeneous in content. They should presented in a logical order (alphabetical, numerical).
There are two questions in each page to serve as examples.
Multiple choice questions or items are an interesting way to assess various levels of learning outcomes, from basic recall to application, analysis, and evaluation.
They are not an effective way to test students’ ability to organize thoughts or articulate explanations or creative ideas, but these abilities should have been assessed in previous tasks such as the FC and PBL activities.
As you all know, a multiple choice item consists of a problem, known as the stem, and a list of suggested solutions, known as alternatives. The alternatives consist of one correct or best alternative, which is the answer, and incorrect or inferior alternatives, known as distractors.
The stem should be meaningful by itself and present a definite problem (unless you want to test your students' ability to draw inferences from vague information). The stem should not content irrelevant material or be negatively stated, students can have difficulty understanding with negative phrasing. It also should be a question or an unfinished sentence, the former better than the latter.
The alternatives should be plausible, they serve as distractors. They should be stated clearly and concisely, and mutually exclusive (and so, all the above or none or the above are not good options) and homogeneous in content. They should presented in a logical order (alphabetical, numerical).
There are two questions in each page to serve as examples.